Vive la Différence
Is a fork male or female? How about a palm tree? A blank CD? A light bulb?
Nouns are assigned a gender in many languages, but not in English. This linguistic peculiarity is the inspiration for www.beautyinchaos.com/sex.html, a new site that asks visitors to vote on whether an object is male or female.
Since high school Spanish class, Paul Grzymkowski, 23, a computer engineer in Burlington, Vt., has wondered why a pencil (un lapiz) is male while a pen (una pluma) is female. Which gender would be assigned to them in English? To this end, he took photos of objects in his home and posted them online so Web users could decide. (For the record, both pen and pencil are male, according to a majority of voters.)
So far, 471,000 votes have been cast for the 102 objects on the site, with a majority being labeled male. Of course, results may be skewed if many more men are voting than women. And Mr. Grzymkowski points out that his photos may influence the results in some cases.
Still, the site is a study in gender stereotypes and Freudian imagery. It will come as no surprise that a hammer, a remote control and poker chips are characterized as predominantly male while yogurt, a drain, and an iron are labeled female. Processed cheese, on the other hand, is a dead heat.
The site may even prompt some soul searching, Mr. Grzymkowski suggested. ''If you decide that paper towels are male but then see that 70 percent chose female you may wonder, what's different about me?'' he said.
Name That Image
Computers excel at sifting information, but they have trouble distinguishing a picture of a tree from one of a turtle.
So researchers at Carnegie Mellon University knew they needed human volunteers to successfully label millions of unmarked images on the Web. Luis von Ahn, a graduate student in computer science, had the inspired idea of turning the laborious process into a two-player contest called the ESP Game (espgame.org).
Each time you play, you are randomly paired with another anonymous player. You can't communicate with your partner, although you both see the same image. The goal is to guess the descriptive word your partner is typing for the image. Once you both type the same word, you see a new image.
Since October the game has attracted 15,000 registered players, and they have created more than 1.5 million labels (a label is a single descriptive word; most photos require multiple labels). The site draws from a database of 200,000 Web images; another 200,000 are to be added soon. Mr. von Ahn said that properly labeling Web images would allow for more efficient image searching, improve the screen readers used by the visually impaired and help users block inappropriate images.
Drew Davidson, director of the game art and design program at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, views the site as part of a trend in which games are used to teach lessons or achieve a civic good. ''They're fun, but they have another goal,'' he said. Some players, however, dislike the anonymity of game partners, a necessary security measure.
Mr. von Ahn said: ''People feel a special connection with their game partners when they earn a high score together, and they want to know who that person is. They see the game as a chance to meet others of similar mindset.''
Trumping Webster's
Is Google becoming the dictionary of choice for Web users?
Regular users of Google are familiar with its ''Did you mean?'' feature. Google's software checks your query to see if you are using the most common version of a word's spelling. If you'll generate better search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask, ''Did you mean: (more common spelling)?'' Yes, I meant focaccia, not foccacia.
SpellWeb (spellweb.com) makes it easy to compare two spellings of a word (or a phrase) on Google. Although editors and linguists may be horrified by the site's exhortation to ''Let the Web decide!'' correct spelling, the site can be used to easily demonstrate how widespread poor spelling and usage have become.
For example, 2.2 million Web references to the millennium spell it correctly, yet a whopping 665,000 use the misspelling ''millenium.'' The situation is dire for some phrases. On the Web, ''here here'' outpolls the correct ''hear hear'' 153,000 to 42,000. Steve Nelson, executive vice president of Clear Ink, the Web design firm that created SpellWeb, said an increasing number of site visitors were using SpellWeb like a coin toss to help them make decisions. ''It's like a Magic 8 Ball,'' he said. ''I've seen people compare two phrases like 'buy custom golf clubs' and 'buy off-the-shelf golf clubs' to see which way the Web prefers.''
On the Radar
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Drawings (Drawings by Chris Gash)
